We are proud to announce a new article within IMAJINE project: “Measuring the Spatial Dimension of Regional Inequality: An Approach Based on the Gini Correlation Measure”, by Domenica Panzera and Paolo Postiglione.
This article was issued by Social Indicators Research, an international and interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement. Since its foundation in 1974, this journal has become the leading journal on problems related to the measurement of all aspects of the quality of life.
In the article, IMAJINE authors introduce a new measure that facilitates the assessment of the relative contribution of spatial patterns to overall inequality. The proposed index is based on the Gini correlation measure and accounts for both inequality and spatial autocorrelation. Unlike most of the spatially based income inequality measures proposed in the literature, our index introduces regional importance weighting in the analysis, thereby differentiating the regional contributions to overall inequality. Starting with the proposed measure, a spatial decomposition of the Gini index of inequality for weighted data is also derived. This decomposition permits the identification of the actual extent of regional disparities and the understanding of the interdependences among regional economies. The proposed measure is illustrated by an empirical analysis focused on Italian provinces.
The article follows the open-access policy, and therefore it is freely downloadable from IMAJINE website here, or from the publisher here.